Automated post treatment of castings as a specialised service

Among other machines a renowned industrial subcontract company is using eight Rösler shot blast machines for the post treatment of castings made from different materials. This allows the company to process high component volumes as well as small batches of special castings.

There are many beneficial reasons for outsourcing the post treatment of castings for example: new projects, increased capacity requirements, or a sudden production surge. IDS Casting Service GmbH is a well-established subcontract company for deburring, grinding, polishing and blast cleaning of a wide range of castings made from all kinds of materials. To meet the growing demand for these subcontract services from car and truck manufacturers, automotive suppliers and the machine-building industry, the company has purchased eight shot blast machines from Rösler during the past five years. Crucial for the decision to go with the supplier from Untermerzbach was the performance, the versatility and reliability of the equipment as well as the excellent technical support offered by Rösler.

Economic, fully automatic processing of large component volumes

IDS utilises four wire mesh belt blast machines for the automatic deburring and blast cleaning of transmission housings made from aluminium and magnesium as well as turbine casings made from chrome-nickel alloys. For the cleaning and surface profiling of, for example, aluminium crankcases the company uses a swing chamber blast machine. To safely and consistently achieve the required shot blast results in short cycle times, all these machines are equipped with four, respectively, two Gamma 300 G turbines with ‘Y’ shaped throwing blades and an installed power of 7.5 and 11kW each. This revolutionary turbine, developed by Rösler, is not only the most maintenance-friendly unit in the industry but also offers a 20 per cent higher blast performance while also offering reduced energy consumption. Another feature of these innovative turbines is the fact that both sides of the throwing blades can be used. A quick-change system allows replacing the throwing blades in a few minutes without having to take the turbine apart. All this results in at least twice the uptime compared to conventional blast turbines. To minimise downtimes required for maintenance work, the blast chambers of the Rösler machines are made from manganese steel. In areas directly exposed to the blast stream they are lined with easily replaceable manganese wear plates.

Compressed air system for blast cleaning of internal passages

For the automatic blast cleaning of internal passages of components like transmission housings, the customer is using an air blast machine allowing the simultaneous processing of two parts. A robot places the castings in the blast chamber and rotates them during the shot blast process. After selection of the component specific treatment program stored in the system PLC, blast lances clean the internal surface areas at a pre-determined speed and stop at the programmed end point. At this moment, the flow of blast media also stops. During the return of the lance to its original position a blow-off system removes residual blast media so that the finished parts can be unloaded without any additional cleaning operation.

As well as these automatic shot blast machines IDS also has two blast cabinets. They are used for jobs that require a manual blast cleaning operation or for particularly complex components requiring a touch-up step after passing through the automatic shot blast machines.